Advantages of the Internet as an economical communications medium are driving companies to use it to deliver business critical applications and network data resources, enabling customers, partners, remote offices and mobile employees to work together and collaborate more efficiently.
However, a fundamental challenge facing organizations today is managing the increasing rate of required changes while maintaining business continuity. The process of building, deploying, integrating applications and melding with packaged applications and third-party data streams is becoming increasingly difficult. Today many enterprises approach migration with a growing series of uncoordinated tools to repeatedly build, rebuild and update operating systems and several other tools for ongoing management. Web-based applications and data provide a key company resource in today's business environment. Legacy applications are a mix of mainframe and pure client/server applications.
In order to consider application redevelopments for the Web, this typically entails a long-term effort, requires significant capital expenditure and frequently results in losing the rich client functionality necessary in business-critical applications to enhance productivity.
Terminal-based or centralized hosting environments in which multiple terminals connect to a host computer (i.e. server-based computing), applications and data are typically deployed, managed and supported on the server with solutions offering delivery and management over the Internet. The principle advantages of this form of deployment are reduced maintenance and support for client terminals, a standardized corporate client terminal and centralized resource management. However, for organizations with multiple locations and numerous users, the costs associated with traditional emulation software can be excessive due to costly individual licensing costs, maintenance, support and updates. Further web-based computing protocols within a server-based computing model could be very sensitive to network delay, consuming a constant amount of unnecessary bandwidth, in addition to utilizing significant server resources for each user session. Another system is virtual private networks (VPN), which allow enterprises to carve secure and reliable “networks” out of the public Internet infrastructure. However, the very nature of a remote access VPN, being to provide secure access to distributed users at numerous remote locations, introduces deployment and maintenance concerns. VPNs are generally unable to deliver instant and continuous connectivity and are processor-intensive and bandwidth-heavy in use. Another drawback of VPNs is that a VPN client must be installed and maintained on every PC that requires access and each individual PC user must be trained to operate the VPN application. This configuration leads to source data, which often resides on laptop PCs or other devices, being left vulnerable to loss or theft. Once connected via a VPN the remote PC is granted full rights and privileges to roam the corporate network, which may be exploited by hackers using a remote VPN connection to gain access to corporate network resources.
There is a need for a system and method for providing access within the corporate environment, remote or mobile access to applications and data, which addresses deficiencies in the prior art.